To:THE SECRETARY, EDITORIAL BOARD OF THE GRANAT PUBLISHING HOUSE

Published:First published in 1923 inProletarskaya RevolutsiaNo. 6–7.

      Sent to Moscow.

      Printed from the original.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,[1976],

      Moscow,Volume 35,

      pages173-174.Translated:Andrew RothsteinTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive.You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Berne, November 17, 1914

DearColleague,

Ihave sent you today by registered post the article on
Marx and
Marxism[1]for the dictionary. It is not for me
to judge how far I have succeeded in solving the difficult
problem of squeezing the exposition into a framework of
about 75,000 letters and spaces. I will observe that I had
to compress the literature very intensively (15,000 was the
ultimatum), and I had to select theessenceof various
tendencies (of course, with the majorityforMarx). It was
difficult to make up my mind to renounce manyquotationsfrom Marx. In my view, quotations are very important
for a dictionary (especially on the most controversial
questions of Marxism, which include philosophy and the agrarian
problem first and foremost). Headers of the dictionary
should have availableallthe most important statements
by Marx, otherwise the purpose of the dictionary would not
be achieved. That is how it seemed to me. I don’t know
either whether you will be satisfied from the point of view
of censorship: if not, perhaps we could manage to agree on
therewordingof some passages, having in mind passing the
censor. For my part, without ultimative demands from the
editorial board, I could not make up my mind to “correct”
a number of quotations and propositions of Marxism for
reasons of censorship.

Ihope you will be kind enough to let me know
immediately (a postcard will do) that you have received the article.
I would ask you particularly to send the fee due to me as
soon as possible to Gospodin Mark TimofeyevichYeliza-rov, 17 Grechesky Prosp., Flat 18,Petrograd(sending it to
me here in wartime would involve the expense of an exchange
operation and would be most inconvenient for me).

Withassurances that I am at your service,V. Ilyin

P.S.On account of the war, my library has been held up
in
Galicia,[2]and I could not find some quotations from
Marx’s works in the Russian translations. If you think itnecessary, perhaps you could request someone in Moscow to
do it? (In my view, it is not.) Incidentally, I should be
very glad if you found it possible to send me a proof of
the article, and to let me know whetherpartialcorrections
of the proof are possible or not. If you cannot send the
proof, I hope you will be kind enough to send me an off-print.

Myaddress: Wl. Uljanow. 11. Distelweg. 11. Bern.

[1]Referenceis to Lenin’s article “Karl Marx (A Brief Biographical
Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism)”, which he wrote for the Granat
Bros. publishing House. It appeared in abridged form in Vol. 28 of the
Encyclopaedic Dictionary, over the signature of V. Ilyin. The full text of
the article was printed in 1925 (see present edition, Vol. 21, pp. 43–91).

[2]Thiswas Lenin’s personal library, which he left in Cracow during the
imperialist world war (1914–18). Much of it was lost.